"The formal mixture of emotion and restraint in Ms. Gandolfo’s writing
is a tip-off that this is the genuine article. Her poetry gives definitive
shape to memory, loss and compassion, and carries that adult gravity that
continues inside a reader. 'When the music comes back, / it wakes you,'
writes the poet, and 'The face that was tomorrow becomes today.'
And so it is, in these moving, thoughtful, wide awake poems."
— Marvin Bell

"Angles of Departure is an elegy written with great reverence and
beauty. The poet navigates a ghost route between absence and presence,
as she articulates what can’t quite be touched with human hands,
reached by a human body, or consciousness." — Sandra Alcosser

"It is an honor to accompany this remarkable first book of Marcene
Gandolfo’s poems into the world—poems that find redemption through
what they have been given—life, death, grief,
memory, devotion; crossing the risky borders
between complexities, her poems explore what
Calvino called 'the conflict between the world’s
choices and man’s obsession with making sense
of them.' Angles of Departure is a masterful
collection full of choices, full of obsessions,
and full of sense—a whopper of a first book."
— Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Marcene Gandolfo’s work has appeared in several literary journals, including DMQ Review, Bayou, Poet Lore, Harpur Palate, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Café Review, Red Rock Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and literature at Sacramento City College and lives in Elk Grove, California, with her husband, daughter, and three cats.